The Hostile Hospital

Chapter Ten

At this point in the dreadful story I am writing, I must interrupt for a moment and describe something that happened to a good friend of mine named Mr. Sirin. Mr. Sirin was a lepidopterist, a word which usually means "a person who studies butterflies."

In this case, however, the word "lepidopterist" means "a man who was being pursued by angry government officials," and on the night I am telling you about they were right on his heels. Mr. Sirin looked back to see how close they were--four officers in their bright-pink uniforms, with small flashlights in their left hands and large nets in their right--and realized that in a moment they would catch up, and arrest him and his six favorite butterflies, which were frantically flapping alongside him. Mr. Sirin did not care much if he was captured--he had been in prison four and a half times over the course of his long and complicated life--but he cared very much about the butterflies. He realized that these six delicate insects would undoubtedly perish in bug prison, where poisonous spiders, stinging bees, and other criminals would rip them to shreds. So, as the secret police closed in, Mr. Sirin opened his mouth as wide as he could and swallowed all six butterflies whole, quickly placing them in the dark but safe confines of his empty stomach. It was not a pleasant feeling to have these six insects living inside him, but Mr. Sirin kept them there for three years, eating only the lightest foods served in prison so as not to crush the insects with a clump of broccoli or a baked potato. When his prison sentence was over, Mr. Sirin burped up the grateful butterflies and resumed his lepidoptery work in a community that was much more friendly to scientists and their specimens. I am telling you this story not just to reveal the courage and imagination of one of my dearest friends, but to help you imagine how Klaus and Sunny felt as they watched Esmé Squalor, disguised as an associate of Dr. Flacutono, walk down the hallway of Heimlich Hospital carrying the long, rusty knife disguised as a surgical tool to be used on Violet. The two youngsters realized that their only chance of finding the Surgical Ward and rescuing their sister was to try and fool this greedy and stiletto-heeled villain, but as they approached her, like Mr. Sirin during his fifth and final prison sentence, the two Baudelaires felt the unpleasant fluttering of butterflies in their stomachs.

"Excuse me, ma'am," Klaus said, trying to sound less like a thirteen-year-old boy and more like someone who had graduated from medical school. "Did you say you were an associate of Dr. Flacutono?"

"If you're someone with a hearing problem," Esmé said rudely, "don't bother me. Go to the Ear Ward."

"I'm not someone with a hearing problem," Klaus said. "This woman and I are associates of Dr. Flacutono."

Esmé stopped in the middle of stabbing the floor, and stared down at the two siblings. Klaus and Sunny could see her eyes shining behind the veil of her fashionable hat as she regarded the children before replying.

"I was just wondering where you were," she said. "Come along with me, and I'll take you to the patient."

"Patsy," Sunny said.

"What she is saying," Klaus said quickly, "is that we're very concerned about Laura V. Bleediotie."

"Well, you won't be concerned for long," Esmé replied, leading the children around a corner to another hallway. "Here, you carry the knife."

The evil girlfriend handed Klaus the rusty blade, and leaned in closely to talk with him. "I'm glad you two are here," she whispered. "The brat's little brother and sister haven't been captured yet, and we still don't have the file on the Snicket fires. The authorities removed it for their investigation. The boss says we might have to torch the place."

"Torch?" Sunny asked.

"Mattathias will take care of that part," Esmé said, looking around the hallway to make sure no one could hear them. "All you have to do is assist with the surgery. Let's hurry up."

Esmé walked up a stairway as fast as her shoes could carry her, and the children followed nervously behind her, Klaus holding the rusty, jagged knife. With every door they opened, every hallway they walked down, and every staircase they ascended, the youngsters were afraid that at any moment Esmé would see through their disguises and realize who they were. But the greedy woman was too busy pausing to yank the blades of the stiletto heels out of the floor to notice that the two additional associates of Dr. Flacutono bore a very strong resemblance to the children she was trying to capture. Finally, Esmé led the Baudelaires to a door marked "Surgical Ward," which was being guarded by someone the children recognized at once. The guard was wearing a coat which read "Heimlich Hospital" and a cap that had the word "GUARD" printed on it in big black print, but Klaus and Sunny could see that this was another spurious disguise. The siblings had seen this person at Damocles Dock, when poor Aunt Josephine had been their guardian, and they'd had to cook for this person when they'd been living with Count Olaf. The spurious guard was an enormous person who looked like neither a man nor a woman, and who had been assisting Count Olaf with his nefarious schemes for as long as the Baudelaires had been escaping from them. The person looked at the children, and the children look back at him or her, certain that they would be recognized. But Olaf's assistant merely nodded and opened the door.

"They've already anesthetized the bratty orphan," Esmé said, "so you ladies merely need to go to her room and bring her to the operating theater. I'm going to try to find that sniveling bookworm and that stupid baby with the oversized teeth. Mattathias says I get to choose which one to keep alive in order to force Mr. Poe to give us the fortune, and which one I get to rip to shreds."

"Good," Klaus said, trying to sound fierce and villainous. "I'm so tired of chasing those kids around."

"Me, too," Esmé said, and the enormous assistant nodded in agreement. "But I'm sure this will be the last time. Once we've destroyed the file, nobody can accuse us of any crimes, and once we murder the orphans, the fortune will be ours."

The villainous woman paused and looked around her to make sure no one was listening, and then, satisfied that no one could hear her, she laughed wildly in triumph. The enormous assistant laughed, too, an odd laugh that sounded like a squeal and a howl at the same time, and the two Baudelaire youngsters tilted back their masked faces and made noises as if they were laughing, too, although their laughter was as spurious as their disguises. Klaus and Sunny felt more like being sick than laughing as they pretended to be as greedy and evil as Count Olaf and his troupe. It had never occurred to the children how these terrible people acted when they didn't have to pretend to be nice, and the two siblings were horrified to hear all the bloodthirsty things Esmé had said. Watching Esmé and the enormous assistant laugh together made the butterflies in the Baudelaire stomachs flutter all the more, and the youngsters were relieved when Esmé finally stopped laughing, and ushered the children into the Surgical Ward.

"I'll leave you ladies in the hands of our associates," she said, and the Baudelaires immediately saw with horror what she meant. Esmé shut the door behind them, and the children found themselves facing two more of Count Olaf's wicked associates.

"Well, hello there," the first one said in a sinister voice, pointing at the two children with an odd-looking hand. One of the fingers was curved at an odd angle while the others hung limp, like socks hung out to dry, and Klaus and Sunny could see at once that this was the associate of Olaf who had hooks instead of hands, wearing rubber gloves to hide his unusual and dangerous appendages. Behind him was a man whose hands were not as familiar, but Klaus and Sunny recognized him just as easily, due to the hideous wig he was wearing on his head. The wig was so limp, white, and curly that it looked like a heap of dead worms, which is not the sort of wig one forgets. The children had certainly not forgotten it from when they had been living in Paltryville, and realized at once that this person was the bald man with the long nose who had been assisting Count Olaf since the Baudelaires' troubles began. The hook-handed man and the bald man with the long nose were among the nastiest members of Olaf's troupe, but unlike the majority of nasty people of this earth, they were also quite clever, and the two young siblings felt the butterfly feeling in their stomachs increase exponentially--a phrase which here means "get much, much worse"--as they waited to see if these two associates were clever enough to see through the children's disguises.

"I can see through your disguise," the hook-handed man continued, and placed one of his spurious hands on Klaus's shoulder.

"Me, too," the bald man said, "but I don't think anyone else will. I don't know how you ladies managed to do it, but you look much shorter in those white coats."

"And your faces don't look as pale in those surgical masks," the hook-handed man agreed. "These are the best disguises Olaf--I mean Mattathias--has ever cooked up."

"We don't have time for all this talking," Klaus said, hoping that the associates wouldn't recognize his voice, either. "We've got to get to Room 922 right away."

"You're right, of course," the hook-handed man said. "Follow us."

The two associates began walking down the hallway of the Surgical Ward as Klaus and Sunny looked at one another in relief.

"Gwit," Sunny murmured, which meant "They didn't recognize us either."

"I know," Klaus replied in a whisper. "They think we're the two powder-faced women, disguised as associates of Dr. Flacutono, instead of two children disguised as the two powder-faced women disguised as associates of Dr. Flacutono."

"Stop all that whispering about disguises," the bald man said. "If anyone hears you, it'll be the end of us."

"Instead of the end of Laura V. Bleediotie," the hook-handed man said with a sneer. "I've been waiting to get hooks on her since she escaped from marrying Mattathias."

"Trapped," Sunny said, sneering as best she could.

"Trapped is right," the bald man said. "I already gave her the anesthetic, so she's unconscious. All we have to do is lead her to the operating theater, and you can saw her head off."

"I still don't understand why we have to murder her in front of all those doctors," the hook-handed man said.

"So it can look like an accident, you idiot," the bald man snarled in reply.

"I'm not an idiot," the hook-handed man said, stopping to glare at his fellow associate. "I'm physically handicapped."

"Just because you're physically handicapped doesn't mean you're mentally clever," the bald man said.

"And just because you're wearing an ugly wig," the hook-handed man said, "doesn't mean you can insult me."

"Stop all this arguing!" Klaus said. "The sooner we can operate on Laura V. Bleediotie, the sooner we'll all be rich."

"Yes!" Sunny said.

The two criminals looked down at the Baudelaires, and then nodded at one another sheepishly. "The ladies are right," the hook-handed man said. "We shouldn't behave unprofessionally, just because it's been a very stressful time at work."

"I know," the bald man said with a sigh. "It seems like we've been following these three orphans forever, only to have them slip out of our grasp at the last minute. Let's just focus on getting the job done, and work out our personal problems later. Well, here we are."

The four disguised people had reached the end of a hallway and were standing in front of a door marked "Room 922," with the name "Laura V. Bleediotie" scrawled on a piece of paper and taped beneath. The bald man took a key out of the pocket in his medical coat, and unlocked the door with a triumphant grin. "Here she is," he said. "Our little sleeping beauty."

The door opened with a long, whiny creak, and the children stepped inside the room, which was square and small and had heavy shades over the windows, making it quite dark inside. But even in the dim light the children could see their sister, and they almost gasped at how dreadful she looked.

When the bald associate had mentioned a sleeping beauty, he was referring to a fairy tale that you have probably heard one thousand times. Like all fairy tales, the story of Sleeping Beauty begins with "Once upon a time," and continues with a foolish young princess who makes a witch very angry, and then takes a nap until her boyfriend wakes her up with a kiss and insists on getting married, at which point the story ends with the phrase "happily ever after." The story is usually illustrated with fancy drawings of the napping princess, who always looks very glamorous and elegant, with her hair neatly combed and a long silk gown keeping her comfortable as she snores away for years and years. But when Klaus and Sunny saw Violet in Room 922, it looked nothing like a fairy tale.

The eldest Baudelaire was lying on a gurney, which is a metal bed with wheels, used in hospitals to move patients around. This particular gurney was as rusty as the knife Klaus was holding, and its sheets were ripped and soiled. Olaf's associates had put her into a white gown as filthy as the sheets, and had twisted her legs together like vines. Her hair had been messily thrown over her eyes so that no one would recognize her face from The Daily Punctilio, and her arms hung loosely from her body, one of them almost touching the floor of the room with one limp finger. Her face was pale, as pale and empty as the surface of the moon, and her mouth was open slightly in a vacant frown, as if she were dreaming of being pricked with a pin. Violet looked like she had dropped onto the gurney from a great height, and if it were not for the slow and steady rise of her chest as she breathed, it would have looked like she had not survived the fall. Klaus and Sunny looked at her in horrified silence, trying not to cry as they gazed at their helpless sister.

"She's a pretty one," the hook-handed man said, "even when she's unconscious."

"She's clever, too," the bald man said, "although her clever little brain won't do her any good when her head has been sawed off."

"Let's hurry up and go to the operating theater," the hook-handed man said, beginning to move the gurney out of the room. "Mattathias said the anesthetic would last for only a little while, so we'd best start the cranioectomy."

"I wouldn't mind if she woke up in the middle of it," the bald man said with a giggle, "but I suppose that would ruin the plan. You ladies take the head end. I don't like to look at her when she's frowning like that."

"And don't forget the knife," the hook-handed man said. "Dr. Flacutono and I will be supervising, but you two will actually perform the operation."

The two children nodded, afraid that if they tried to speak, the two henchmen would hear how anxious they were and become suspicious. In silence they took their places at the gurney where their sister lay without moving. The Baudelaires wanted to gently shake her by the shoulders, or whisper in her ear, or even just brush the hair away from her eyes--anything at all to help their unconscious sibling. But the two youngsters knew that any affectionate gesture would give away their disguise, so they just walked alongside the gurney, clutching the rusty knife, as the two men led the way out of Room 922 and through the halls of the Surgical Ward. With every step, Klaus and Sunny watched their sister carefully, hoping for a sign that the anesthesia was wearing off, but Violet's face remained as still and blank as the sheet of paper on which I am printing this story.

Although her siblings preferred to think about her inventing abilities and conversational skills rather than her physical appearance, it was true, as the hook-handed man had said, that Violet was a pretty one, and if her hair had been neatly combed, instead of all tangled up, and she had been dressed in something elegant and glamorous, instead of a stained gown, she might indeed have looked like an illustration from "Sleeping Beauty." But the two younger Baudelaires did not feel like characters in a fairy tale. The unfortunate events in their lives had not begun with "Once upon a time," but with the terrible fire that had destroyed their home, and as Olaf's associates led them to a square metal door at the end of the hallway, Klaus and Sunny feared that their lives would not end like a fairy tale either. The label on the door read "Operating Theater," and as the hook-handed man opened it with one curved glove, the two children could not imagine that their story would end with "happily ever after."